The Vocabulary.com Top 1000

The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL.
To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.

The authors found that when the available prospects varied more in
attributes such as age, height, occupation and educational background, people made fewer dating proposals.Scientific American (Feb 13, 2012)

Well, safety
advocates, consumers and the government dragged the automobile industry toward including seat belts, air bags, more visible taillights and other safety features.New York Times (Feb 19, 2012)

He was uneven, disproportioned, saying ordinary things on great occasions, and now and then, without the slightest provocation, uttering the
sublimest and most beautiful thoughts.Ingersoll, Robert Green

It opened a month ago to considerable
fanfare, with television cameras trailing government officials meandering proudly around the bright new stores filled with imported goods.New York Times (Aug 22, 2010)